Excerpt from 'Coming of Age at the End of History'

COMING OF AGE AT THE END OF HISTORY

By Camille de Toledo

Soft Skull Press

Contents

The New Captivity Which way to the egress?..........................................1
The New Stranglehold What is the color of water?....................................59
The New Incarnation What is invisible, yet lies in plain sight?.....................101
Epilogue.............................................................................149
Notes................................................................................153

Chapter One

THE NEW CAPTIVITY

Which way to the egress?

"If there no longer seems to be any alternative to so-called reality [...],
it's not because the real finally stands naked before our eyes. Far from it.
What calls itself realism is really a kind of idealism. These days, we live as
though underwater, submerged in a representation of the world and of ourselves
which forecloses on every objection, every alternative. And this total
intolerance is its claim to glory."

"Naturally, it's a coercive technique, but one that the prisoner has to agree
to first. Consent must be given from the very beginning; the individual must
allow the electronic bracelet to be placed on his wrist. And once the detainee
is promised his freedom in return for wearing the bracelet consent is easily
acquired."

A man stands still. He's suffocating. Transparent walls rise up around him on
all sides, clear as glass, but he doesn't know they are there. There's a ringing
in his ears, a vast clamor of voices, opinions, and messages telling him
relentlessly that he is free to choose, free to dream, even free to rebel if
that's what he chooses to do. It's not the clamor of a department store. It's
not talk radio, he's not in a movie theater. Like the six billion other people
on the planet, he's locked inside the New Architecture of the United World. He's
heard a thing or two about his prison: this world, the world we live in now,
is all there is. There's nothing left outside it and there's no other world
possible. Or: there's no such thing as distance anymore. Or again:
only capitalism is truly revolutionary. And finally: the world today is
complete, one and indivisible.

He can't remember where he first heard these ideas. He doesn't know who
decided it should be that way. All he really knows is that sometime in the
not-so-distant past, capital had licked its lips one last time and swept the
last anti-establishment vestiges at the corners of its mouth into its gullet.
And boom! the N.A.U.W. was here to stay. He'd gone through many changes in his
search for a way out. He'd fought to improve the lot of the Third World. Later
on, he'd become a Situationist. Next came Trotskyism. Some of his friends from
that period are still in prison for terrorism. When punk came along, heroin in
tow, he had done both. This, he had figured, might finally be what he had been
waiting for. He'd OD, go out with a big fuck you. Finally, he settled for
resignation. And really, resignation wasn't all that bad. After all, the New
Architecture of the United World is democratic and generous. In the N.A.U.W.
human beings are born with equal rights, including the right to happiness.
Through education and work every single one of them has a chance to acquire
every single convenience of every modern lifestyle. And finally, doesn't the
N.A.U.W. guarantee peace among all nations? Doesn't it hold out the promise of
economic development to poor countries everywhere?

"Anyway," the suffocating man said to himself, "if capital co-opts
everything, even its best and most driven critics, then why fight? You get fed,
right? Outrage, resistance, fighting the power, subversion, revolt,
revolution-it's all so last century now."

And the suffocating man was not mistaken. Capitalism's project had changed.
Capitalism had become so thoroughly modern-so thoroughly postmodern as well-that
frankly even those who rejected capitalism looked conservative. From within the
corridors of economic and cultural power, now the same power, the malcontents
now just looked like people who didn't know how to have a good time. What was
their problem anyway? Thanks to the way the New Architecture of the Unified
World was laid out, rejecting the establishment was now part of the
establishment's very foundation. Abolishing all values had become the only
value. You could listen to your poets and your rock stars, you could mix it up,
shoot it up, and have your acid visions, it all still ended up being good for
the bottom line. The establishment had warmed to its rebels and raging
visionaries a long time ago. Now they were sought-after celebrities, picking at
caviar with the elite, making copy with their bouts of air rage in first class.
In fact, all the aesthetic norms of capital had morphed. The king of pop culture
used to be a heavily perspiring white man. No more! Today the old empire has
fractured into a thousand provinces, exotic, hybrid, and sensual. World music is
the world's music. We've come a long way, baby.

So the suffocating man jumped aboard the N.A.U.W., and surrender was not
without some surprises. His name began to appear in print. Journalists and
multinational corporations alike smiled on his progress, and behold, their
smiles were the same smile.

He discovered that he could turn tricks with his alt-culture savvy. It could
make him rich.

No sooner was he on the payroll, he found his salary growing. Rapidly. It was
one thing after another. He became an art director with an ad agency, then the
publisher of a hip magazine, then a booster for the new economy. Next stop was
the host spot on a voyeuristic reality show that fed hungry mainstream audiences
showfuls of ever more exotic deviances. And from there, it was a small step to a
job with a UN agency created to bring the wonders of modern communication and
information technologies to the benighted peoples of underdeveloped countries.

From these experiences our man concluded that humanity's sole destiny was to
work toward reform, and reform was only possible under democratic capitalism. It
was impossible to go beyond that framework and as for the counterculture, its
only possible destiny was the total and specific commodification of every last
one of its modes of expression. So why, you might ask, why was this man
suffocating? This man, for whom rebellion had proven so lucrative? He had no
idea.

He ran his hands along the invisible walls. Back when the barriers were
shaggy with coils of razor wire it was all much more simple. When the other side
had a name and an address. Beads of sweat oozed from his forehead. A pissed-off
looking young guy suddenly rounded a corner and booked past him. They were not
all that different from one another, though he figured he had about thirty years
on the newcomer. He watched as the kid pulled two cans of spray paint from his
pockets, red and black, and with a flurry of forearms the words Power is
invisible until you provoke it appeared dripping as if suspended in air along
the flank of the invisible barrier.

The suffocating man tried to keep from smiling, but it was no use-he knew
that soon enough the slogan would end up adorning a pair of Nikes. The kid took
a step back and watched outraged as his graffiti melted away. Then he reached
out and punched the space where a moment ago he had tattooed his anger. His fist
sunk deep into the wall. He hit it again, harder, and this time the momentum of
his punch carried him right through the wall. On the other side, he found
himself confronted by a smiling human resources director who promptly offered
him a job at a design studio. "It's 100% employee-owned," human resources
enthused, taking the kid by the hand.

As this scene unfolded, the suffocating man absently unbuttoned his shirt
collar and groped for the edge of one of the soft walls of the New Architecture
of the United World. Fingers grazing the wall for guidance, he took off running,
slipped into a small alleyway and began weaving away from the arterials, up the
shrinking feeders, farther and farther from the center. After a while he figured
he must be reaching the outer edges of the fortifications. Soon, he thought, the
walls would be old and crumbling, full of cracks. Instead, he rounded a corner
and emerged blinking into what seemed to be some kind of bizarre theme park.

Subcommandante Marcos was digging out scoops of ice cream and whacking them
into cones for the visitors, people like, yes, there was El Ché, pumping away at
the joystick of a virtual reality game. They also had this haunted mine ride
where you could take an old-timery mine train with a bust of Marx bolted on the
front like a figurehead and rocket down into fake caverns.

Five Pillars

My soul has asthma. I mean that the atmosphere of these times causes me
severe respiratory distress. It's not the old problems, the familiar problems
that we all know by heart. My suffering is less public. None of the usual
symptoms here-no coughing fits, no hawking and spitting. I have observed, met,
or been a part of almost everything people say exemplifies the spirit of the
times, and in every case I have come away from these pathetic excuses for
nourishment choking even harder. I need air. That's why I have been rooting
through the debris of my 1990s for such a long time, looking for a place where I
could come up for air, for one or two ideas that could give me some breathing
space. I'm sure I'm not the only one. There's no way. I'm willing to bet that
the suffocating I'm talking about is a suffocating we. The we of a
generation whose outlook was formed between the poles of two strangely
symmetrical dates: 11/9-November 9, 1989, and 9/11, that September day not so
many years ago. On one of those days a wall came down, on the other two towers
fell. Boom behind, Badaboom in front. Two times nine, two times
eleven, double collapse. Both of those days are history now, but during the
years in between "capitalism" became for me another word for maturity. I mean
that I came to understand growing up as the process of resigning yourself to
Reality ... the brute reality of egoism, the idiotic reality of competition, the
imbecilic reality of the incentive-driven life and the duty not only to exist,
but to exist with a cozy layer of lard on your ass and a protective patty of
bullshit on your eyes. Two times nine, two times eleven. Like dust clouds rising
from the double collapse, a special kind of consciousness billowed up from the
debris of this decade, as yet unaware of itself, mine, ours: 119911. The
palindrome-consciousness of my generation. A generation for whom all there was
to see in front or behind were immense clouds of dust and debris. But it's worth
trying to understand it, this palindrome-consciousness. I don't think anyone
really has, not yet anyway. Its elders have gagged it. It's supposed to just
shut up. Well, maybe it can make a little noise, maybe it gets to speak a few
lines, but only if they're watered-down, sugar-coated, shrink-wrapped, and
sanitized for consumption. The plan is to keep its voice stifled until the
members of yet another generation grow old, petrified and contaminated, a
thousand little renunciations stamped into their faces like crows-feet. And all
this so that when the moment comes for this generation to claim its place in the
history books and walk out onto life's big stages, it will be too late. By then,
that beautiful spirit forged by the double collapse will have been entirely
co-opted, its need for air sated by snack food and other assorted trivialities.
This is why I have set out here to document the phenomenon before rot sets in,
before life has eaten away what is left of my innocence. I've had it with the
sage advice of the compromised and resigned. Let me say right away-I know it's
true-our generation-the sons and daughters of the BOOM and the BADABOOM-our
generation now has within its grasp the kind of power and the kind of honesty
that can work the great changes, that can create real works of art. Every day I
watch as our elders shamelessly extend their empire and spread their bullshit
around and it makes me nearly blind with rage. Why don't they just finish dying
for fuck's sake and take their miserable egos with them, their nostalgia, their
State, their sexual liberation, their failed revolutions, their shattered
illusions, their political parties, their parliaments and their putrid corpses.
We don't want any more of the history they are writing. Here's ours,
right here!

For the children of the double collapse, the initial motivation behind the
new spirit of revolt isn't economic. It's respiratory. It starts with a vague,
unpleasant and overpowering feeling. A stifling feeling of being cornered, boxed
in, buried alive! Does that do it justice? It's a violent claustrophobic
reaction to the idea that the world is a finished piece of work. That among
other things, it has finally been confirmed that there is only one system of
political, social, and cultural management available to humanity. You get
strangely ill from having your options cut off like this; it's a disease without
obvious symptoms. Its first sign is an overpowering sense of powerlessness. Then
nausea sets in, it moves up through the gut, chokes the throat and then spreads
throughout the entire body. This is the malaise that is driving the spoiled
children of the West as they attempt to rediscover the possibility of
resistance. Was it just some kind of panic attack? I don't think so. The last
twelve years were clogged with despair. If we're still here, it's because we
were forced to invent a reason to go on living. We had to forge an outlook that
REJECTS RESIGNATION.

"What is a rebel?" Albert Camus asked in 1951. "A man who says no, but whose
refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the
moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all
his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he
mean by saying 'no'?" The market has been systematically co-opting revolt ever
since, for 50 years now. The question today isn't any longer what does he
mean by saying "no"? What we need to ask now is why "no" doesn't mean
anything anymore. Say no to whom exactly, to what? This
impossibility, absolute until the demonstrations in Seattle, Prague and
Genoa suggested otherwise, is the keystone in our globalized prison's invisible
architecture, the linchpin of what I am calling the new captivity. This is the
sea into which we were cast as teenagers, where the main choices were limited to
despair, suicide or irony. Despair? Despair over a destiny that is finished as
soon as it has begun to unfold. Suicide? A way out. Irony? A means of survival.
As the walls closed in the wake of the disappointments of earlier generations,
principled revolt became increasingly difficult: its causes were discredited,
its inspiration was polluted, and its value was restated in terms of the
money-making potential of its different poses. This fate was not imposed from
above. No one was forced into cynicism. People just heard the same message over
and over: "Well, all this has been tried before, and look what good that did."
We were already jaded, and anyway, Camus's "no" was beginning to bore us. No one
even noticed as the different forms of revolt unraveled, and turned into what
were at best quaint sound-bites and at worst marketing strategies. People would
express their rage and there would be all this angry noise and every time it all
just ended up seeming like a temporary pose. In spite of this, we can still feel
the sincerity of that righteous indignation, late at night when we are by
ourselves and undistracted by the drone of entertainment. But it has become
something obscene, something we must hide from others.

This is how life is in the new captivity. My goal in setting out on this
exploratory mission into its invisible architecture has been to try and
understand how revolt has been neutralized and how in our resulting
helplessness-since there are apparently no other options open-we seem condemned
to seek shelter in irony. I want to suggest that our bondage rests on five
pillars, five conditions that are the building blocks, as it were, of the
impasse our generation finds itself in today. The first pillar has come down
squarely in front of History, and so History has stopped moving. The second
ensures that anyone attempting to resist will be instantly condemned. The third
pillar is the co-option of any and all efforts at subversion. The fourth pillar
is a machine that has sucked up everything marginal and spat it out into the
mainstream. And the fifth is the dispersion of economic and political power so
wide that it has become impossible to confront it. This pentagon has been our
school of despair. Between those five walls an entire generation was trained in
the sciences of cynical laughter and in the arts of what I am going to call
mass dandyism.